4 ms·

I've been using emacs for years, and I certainly did the whole "oh wow use emacs for everything" bit. Over time, I've pulled back and don't use many plugins out

by ben509 9y ago

I've been using emacs for years, and I certainly did the whole "oh wow use emacs for everything" bit. Over time, I've pulled back and don't use many plugins outside of helm and flycheck. I can not for the life of me understand the appeal of org-mode. It's probably just me, because most other organizers don't work for me, but if you're going to do a file-based organizer, it seems like you want a way to easily pull stuff out of old files so your working set isn't spread out all over the place.

mjhoy 9y ago
> it seems like you want a way to easily pull stuff out of old files so your working set isn't spread out all over the place. Hmm. What do you mean exactly? I have all sorts of stuff in my org mode files, and what keeps track of them for me is the agenda view (i.e. it finds TODOs, deadlines, events, etc).
- gkya 9y ago
  I've learned agenda views quite late, it's one of the killer features of org mode. Until then I mostly used org for notes and latex export. Maybe the manuals should emphasise it a bit more, it might be hard to discover.
brandonmenc 9y ago
> I can not for the life of me understand the appeal of org-mode. I used emacs for nearly two decades, and I agree. I tried - so hard - to get into org-mode, but just couldn't do it. I'd use it religiously for a week or two, and then the inertia was just too high. Or maybe I really didn't need all the features. Who knows. Saying you "don't get" org-mode is blasphemy in the church of emacs, so I just assumed something was wrong with me and kept my mouth shut, and used it as a very simple todo list. I would, however, use org-mode if I were say, working on a PhD or doing long-term public research where keeping everything in an open format was essential.
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  I stopped using org-mode when I moved from academia to work as a programmer so that fits with what you say.
  - codygman 9y ago
    I use org-mode for work actually. Kind of similar to this but less devops: http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.htm...
tincholio 9y ago
There's a lot more to org than the GTD/organizer aspects. It's brilliant for just writing and note taking, and can export to TeX/PDF/HTML with no friction at all. It also provides a great environment for literate programming, and also for polyglot use cases (code + scripts + makefiles + whatever), as well as a Jupyter-like interface for "live documents". The tables functionality is also great, and the structural editing aspects (move subtrees, bullet lists, etc) is very handy when editing as well.
BeetleB 9y ago
>I can not for the life of me understand the appeal of org-mode. It's probably just me, because most other organizers don't work for me, but if you're going to do a file-based organizer, it seems like you want a way to easily pull stuff out of old files so your working set isn't spread out all over the place. Genuinely curious: What did you find problematic with Org mode? I could not understand your example. It would be bad advertising to say Org Mode is for everyone. Most people I know use OneNote, and frankly, One Note really is better in many ways. I would not try to convince them to switch to org mode. And although Org Mode is very powerful, there isn't a reason a given person should need all that power. For me, when I encountered it while living in Linux land, I simply did not have any alternatives. I don't remember the name, but I was using a tool provided by KDE, and Org Mode was far better by comparison. So even for simple notes, Org mode was the superior choice. All the extra bells and whistles were icing on the cake. My email was all text as well (mutt). And it was really nice to switch to Emacs for email (notmuch) and have Org mode create TODOs with links to emails.
codygman 9y ago
> I can not for the life of me understand the appeal of org-mode For me it's the seamless transition (no transition?) between deciding to do something, creating an outline, creating todo's, scheduling them/creating deadlines, writing code directly under the todo's using org-babel.

by ben509 9y ago

mjhoy 9y ago

> it seems like you want a way to easily pull stuff out of old files so your working set isn't spread out all over the place. Hmm. What do you mean exactly? I have all sorts of stuff in my org mode files, and what keeps track of them for me is the agenda view (i.e. it finds TODOs, deadlines, events, etc).

gkya 9y ago
I've learned agenda views quite late, it's one of the killer features of org mode. Until then I mostly used org for notes and latex export. Maybe the manuals should emphasise it a bit more, it might be hard to discover.

brandonmenc 9y ago

> I can not for the life of me understand the appeal of org-mode. I used emacs for nearly two decades, and I agree. I tried - so hard - to get into org-mode, but just couldn't do it. I'd use it religiously for a week or two, and then the inertia was just too high. Or maybe I really didn't need all the features. Who knows. Saying you "don't get" org-mode is blasphemy in the church of emacs, so I just assumed something was wrong with me and kept my mouth shut, and used it as a very simple todo list. I would, however, use org-mode if I were say, working on a PhD or doing long-term public research where keeping everything in an open format was essential.

Myrmornis 9y ago
I stopped using org-mode when I moved from academia to work as a programmer so that fits with what you say.
- codygman 9y ago
  I use org-mode for work actually. Kind of similar to this but less devops: http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.htm...

tincholio 9y ago

There's a lot more to org than the GTD/organizer aspects. It's brilliant for just writing and note taking, and can export to TeX/PDF/HTML with no friction at all. It also provides a great environment for literate programming, and also for polyglot use cases (code + scripts + makefiles + whatever), as well as a Jupyter-like interface for "live documents". The tables functionality is also great, and the structural editing aspects (move subtrees, bullet lists, etc) is very handy when editing as well.

BeetleB 9y ago

>I can not for the life of me understand the appeal of org-mode. It's probably just me, because most other organizers don't work for me, but if you're going to do a file-based organizer, it seems like you want a way to easily pull stuff out of old files so your working set isn't spread out all over the place. Genuinely curious: What did you find problematic with Org mode? I could not understand your example. It would be bad advertising to say Org Mode is for everyone. Most people I know use OneNote, and frankly, One Note really is better in many ways. I would not try to convince them to switch to org mode. And although Org Mode is very powerful, there isn't a reason a given person should need all that power. For me, when I encountered it while living in Linux land, I simply did not have any alternatives. I don't remember the name, but I was using a tool provided by KDE, and Org Mode was far better by comparison. So even for simple notes, Org mode was the superior choice. All the extra bells and whistles were icing on the cake. My email was all text as well (mutt). And it was really nice to switch to Emacs for email (notmuch) and have Org mode create TODOs with links to emails.

codygman 9y ago

> I can not for the life of me understand the appeal of org-mode For me it's the seamless transition (no transition?) between deciding to do something, creating an outline, creating todo's, scheduling them/creating deadlines, writing code directly under the todo's using org-babel.